"Virtually every school will fall short"

The New York Times ran an interesting article over the weekend about No Child Left Behind, focusing on California. The gist of the article was that the federal law’s goals for schools are completely unrealistic — namely the requirement that six short years from now every student is expected to be proficient in math and English. The finding in the article will come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with this topic, but it’s interesting reading nonetheless.

The article discusses how demoralizing it can be for schools to be making significant gains, yet still be falling short of the double-digit test-score improvements that are required. In many cases, schools that are making big gains in all but one ethnic subgroup are considered to be failing, when in fact the hard-working teachers and principals are seeing laudable progress.

“The law is diagnosing schools that just have the sniffles with having
pneumonia,” Jim Rex, the South Carolina schools superintendent, told the Times.

The article brought to mind the roll-out of Academic Performance Index scores a month ago. Many people I interviewed that day spoke of the almost hopelessly stringent requirements of NCLB.

This year, about half of California’s 9,800 schools fell short of NCLB targets, according to the Times. And it’s probably only going to get worse. One month ago when scores were released, Lincoln Unified Superintendent Steven Lowder said, “The bar is raised in such a ridiculous manner that in the end, we’ll
all end up failing.”

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